reading instruction

So, you’ve adopted a structured approach to phonics but aren’t seeing the growth you had hoped for?  This lack of growth could be evident in some, most or all students and leave you scratching your head, wondering what went wrong?  This week, I’d like to point you in the direction of a few things that might need tightening to get those results you are looking for. 

Reason #1 – Student focus is not what it could be

Our early years students are little people.  Their ability to pay attention ofte…

I recently wrote a post about my impressions of the English component of Version 9 of the Australian Curriculum. You can find that post here.  There is much to be celebrated in the update including the removal of references to predictable texts and 3 cueing strategies.  In reading through the content descriptors, however, I was a little disappointed to see that comprehension strategies,

“such as visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising and questioning to understand and discuss texts list…

There has been a lot of talk in the media in recent weeks about the difficulties experienced by the teaching profession. The television show, 60 Minutes presented a story about teacher workload and teacher shortages. A former teacher recently spoke on stage about how “…Teachers’ hearts are broken” by the work we are asked to do, and we have seen industrial action on the news. I don’t, for one minute, want to imply that there are no issues that need attention in education. What I do want to do in…

One of the features often seen in primary classrooms, both upper and lower, is reading groups. Students are grouped based on their benchmark reading assessment and taught to use a range of strategies to read text such as looking at the first letter of a word and looking at pictures or skipping and word and coming back to see what makes sense. While the teachers works with a small group at a time on guided reading (often having 5 or 6 groups in the class), the rest of the students engage in ‘lite…

I have long said that there can be no separation between emotions and learning.  The way we feel significantly impacts the way that we interact with the material in front of us and our motivation to participate in lessons.  When I was learning to drive a manual car and stalled on a hill outside a mechanic’s workshop (you might well imagine how mortifying that was), I threw my keys on the kitchen bench after I arrived home and demanded my husband buy me a new car because there was no way I was dr…

Let’s face it, there is plenty to worry about in our profession. Are our students learning? How does our community perceive us? Are our teaching methods evidence informed and effective? But there are also many things we might worry about that do nothing more than take up our precious energy and distract us from our core business.

Number 1 – How Pretty Your Classroom Is

Spending hours making your classroom look Pinterest perfect is, quite honestly, not the best use of your time.  In the same ti…

How much time do you currently spend setting up your classroom displays? 1 hour, 3 hours, 10 hours?  Of those hours spent, how much of that time is for the purpose of setting up interactive records of learning and how much of it is purely for display purposes?

I have always loved making my classroom gorgeous. When I taught preschool and the students wanted to learn about rainforests, I made them a fully immersive rainforest experience. When they wanted to learn about the ocean, I made them a re…

When I run online workshops and free PL I often ask, “who finds it difficult to manage the range of student needs in your classroom?” Every single time there are masses of green ticks and thumbs up in the reactions.  It’s usually not that teachers don’t know how to meet students where they are up to, it’s that the quest to do so can leave us feeling like an instructional plate spinner and just when we feel like we’ve got it covered, something else is introduced threatening to bring all of the pl…

School has started back and many foundation teachers are wondering what phonological and phonemic awareness (PA) should look like in the early days of the year.

There are a lot of ideas around about this. Here are just a few.

• Phonological and phonemic awareness develops in a progression of skills that we have to work through one at a time. This means that students need to have learned all of the earlier phonological skills before we begin on phonemic awareness.
• We shouldn’t use a pre-writte…

One of the hardest things for us to fit into our day is listening to every student read aloud. In days gone by, this was a daily feature. Even if students spent much of their time doing busywork or mucking around putting pegs on the end of their fingers during Guided Reading sessions, we at least felt good that we had heard everyone read.  The move away from these groups to more whole class instruction means that teachers feel an understandable anxiety that we aren’t paying enough attention to i…